Sharp and Sweet
by Wintertime
Summary: The case is only simple on the surface, and Nick knows Catherine well enough to understand. CN.


Note: My first real attempt at a Catherine/Nick story that's _not _a drabble, combined with the Halloween-crime plot that I actually came up with months ago . . . I know it's a little early for a story set around Halloween, but I couldn't resist.  So here's a complete C/N vignette.

Disclaimer: I don't own CSI or its characters; they all belong to CBS.

- -

The ghost handed her an apple.

"I didn't really want it," the ghost said confidentially, "but Mommy says that apples are good for you, and I shouldn't give them back just because _some people _won't hand out candy like you're _supposed_ to."

Catherine took the apple gingerly.  She was wearing latex gloves, but she could tell that, even without them, she would have felt nothing unusual about the apple itself.  The skin looked smooth and flawlessly red, not bruised, not softened.  She handed it to Nick, who bagged it and examined it through the clear plastic.  His own latex-covered finger moved over the peel and stopped near the bottom curve.

"Here," he said.  "I can see a break."

She moved closer to take a look.  Her hand brushed against the soft fabric of his jacket, but she didn't pull away.  Yes, closer, she could see the line he was talking about.  Down by the core, there was a slit in the peel - - nothing that she would have noticed if she hadn't been looking.  A little slit that looked as if it could have been accidentally made by someone's fingernail in the grocery store.  The little gap between peel and fruit that marked the spot where the apple-giving neighbor had slipped a razor blade inside the apple itself.

Catherine made herself smile at the ghost, who tugged off her hood to reveal a lively seven-year-old girl, a brunette.  Catherine was absurdly glad that the kid wasn't a blonde - - she didn't to see any reflection of her daughter holding up an apple with a deadly prize like that hidden inside.

"Thanks a lot," Catherine said, and she could see Nick nodding in her peripheral vision.  "I'm sure the rest of your candy is fine, but why don't you let the officers over there check it out first, okay?"

The ghost - - no longer quite so ghostly - - nodded.  "Happy Halloween," she said cheerfully, and, clutching her plastic pumpkin basket, scampered over to the two cops by the driveway.  Catherine waved at them - - they were both hip-deep in Hershey bars, and they didn't look too thrilled about it.

"Remember trick-or-treating?" Nick asked.

She nodded.  "I used to take garbage bags so I wouldn't run out of room."

"Pillowcases for me," Nick said.  He lifted the apple into his vision again and frowned at it.  "Got my share of apples, too.  Always ate them - - there was never anything wrong.  We knew all of our neighbors."

Sometimes, Catherine thought that Nick grew up in some fairy tale.  He always sounded so confident when he talked about his childhood, as if there were nothing that they could possible be ashamed of, nothing that needed to be kept secret.  But then she'd remember Nick's babysitter, and feel ashamed of herself for thinking like that - - Nick hadn't had a perfect childhood.  Nick was just an optimist.

Besides, he wasn't trying to be optimistic right now - - this was just his way of reflecting on the case.

"We never knew all our neighbors," Catherine said.  "My mother made me promise only to eat the hermetically-sealed, shrink-wrapped candies.  No cookies, no apples, no brownies.  And, you know - - never, _ever _go into someone's house for a treat."

Nick smiled.  "Suspicious, huh?"

"It's a cruel world."  She took the apple from him and tilted it up to the light.  "This proves it."

"I don't like it anymore than you do," Nick said, and sighed.  "How many of these have we bagged now?"  He answered himself before she could check the figure.  "Thirty-seven.  Thirty-seven kids with razor blade apples, and twelve of them already with cuts from taking a bite."

"At least it's just open-and-shut," she said. 

All the kids in question remembered who had given them the damaged apples, and the cops who weren't on candy-inspection had already left to bring the guy in for questioning.  Catherine had chosen to stay at the scene, not really wanting to meet a creep who'd do something like that to unsuspecting kids, and Nick, surprisingly, had stayed with her.  She'd expected him to attend the officers, if for no reason other than curiosity, but he'd just shrugged.

"Do you want me to leave?" he'd asked, and she'd said no.

Sometimes she wanted Nick never to leave.  Like right now - - she liked the feeling of him standing near her, warm and solid and comforting.  She liked that he never asked too much and liked that he always knew when she needed him there.  And maybe it was going a little bit beyond liking, even, not that she'd mention it to him. 

Nick was Nick, and she wouldn't make him Eddie.

She worried that if she ever brought up the topic, something between them would change.  She worried that they wouldn't slip effortlessly between friends and lovers, that somewhere, they would be caught, and stopped.  He would be different, or she would, and Catherine liked some things to stay the same.

Nick had always been constant, never temporary.  She'd drifted between men since her divorce, never keeping one for too long, but Nick had always been there for her to count on, always been present.  Never as a lover, but that was a close enough name for someone whose shoulder you could always lean on, someone who noticed when you changed shampoos, and someone who sometimes held your gaze for a little too long in conversations.  Nick had never been a variable.  He was something dependable in her life, and she wasn't going to risk that on the chance that he might love her, because, if he didn't, things would crash down like a tower of blocks, the bottom smoothly removed.

She took razor blade apples from two witches and a brightly-colored butterfly, and added them to the stack by Nick.  His hands brushed against hers as they transported the apples, never for more than a moment, but it always seemed meaningful.  Intentional.

She just wasn't sure whose intent it was.

She thanked a Harry Potter for his apple and took the last one from a widely-grinning vampire.  Nick touched her shoulder, and she let herself be steered away from the crowd and into the relative quiet and darkness at the foot of the drive.

"This case is bothering you, isn't he?" he said quietly.

She gave him a sharp look.  "I don't like it," she said.  "Neither do you.  I saw those kids with their mouths all cut-up.  I heard them crying.  You were there."

"I was there," Nick agreed, "and I get that you're upset about it.  I am, too.  But something's freaking you out a little closer to home."  His eyes narrowed as his thoughts jumped tracks.  "Closer to home - - Catherine, you live around here, don't you?"

She pointed to the east.  "Two blocks down."  She brushed her hair back from her face as one of the night-chilly October winds blew it forward.  "Lindsey's at a Halloween party tonight - - I mean, she might not have made it down here anyway, but she and her friends have a pretty wide route.   I juts keep thinking that I might be one of the mothers over there - - holding my daughter's hand because she took a big bite out of a razor blade apple."

"You wouldn't have let her," he said.  "I _know _you, Catherine.  And you said it yourself - - you never ate the apples or anything when you were a kid.  You know better than to trust people in Vegas."

The person she trusted most in Vegas was standing directly across from her, looking at her with dark, serious eyes.  She fought down a not-quite-hysterical laugh and smiled at him.

"I know," she said.  "It wouldn't have happened.  But I'm still thinking about it."

He nodded, and brushed his hand over her arm.  His fingers slid over the soft cotton of her blouse, and were gone in an instant.  A fleeting gesture, but he didn't look embarrassed about it.

"When do you go off-shift tonight?" she asked.

Nick checked his watch.  "Ten minutes ago."

They had the same schedule, then.  No wonder Grissom had paired them together for the Halloween case.  As simple as the investigation was, he must have realized that they would finish up around the time they could clock out.  She motioned to the bags of apples resting against the cool asphalt.

"Let's hand these over to the cops," she said, "and phone the lab, tell them we're done for the night."

He didn't protest, although she knew he was probably tired.  He rubbed at his eyes.  "What do you want to do, Cath?"

"Come over," she said.  "I'll - - we'll just sit up for a while, okay?  You're right, this _has _gotten me kind of frazzled.  I just want to wait for Lindsey to get home, and I don't want to do my waiting all by myself."  She hoped that that didn't sound too pathetic, but thought that it did.  "I'll make you a sandwich," she offered, as if the proposition of bologna-and-cheese would sway him if he didn't want to be swayed.  "We can eat Oreos and watch _I Love Lucy_."

He smiled.  "You hate that show," he said.

How had he figured that one out?  Sure, she wasn't a fan - - she didn't like a lot of the older television shows, with their sweet-as-pie housewives and contrived comic situations, but she didn't remember mentioning it to Nick, and then the moment came to her - - almost three months ago, and then just in passing.  They were pulling a body out of an apartment, and the poor guy had died in the middle of a Nick at Nite marathon, and she'd just mentioned it while Lucille Ball wailed in the background.

But he had remembered that.  With the smell of the rotting body and the case to think about, Nick had somehow stored away the tidbit that Catherine, in fact, _didn't _love Lucy.

"Okay," she said, smiling despite herself, "we'll watch something on HBO, instead.  Something racy, with lots of swearing.  A _Sopranos_ rerun, maybe."

The two of them crated the apples in a matter of minutes, and left them to the disgruntled officers, who were grousing loudly about _more _things to do.  Normally, it would have given her enough of a guilt trip to stick around and take them to the lab herself, but she didn't want to touch the things again.  There was something sinister about how they looked - - the perfect roundness of shape concealing the blade inside.  Apples from the tree of knowledge, with a truly sour consequence.

Nick seemed to pick up on her thoughts, and punched one of the cops in the shoulder.  "Cheer up," he said.  "Maybe when you're done, you'll get some Starbursts as a bonus."

"Everybody's a comedian," the man grumbled as they walked off.

She drove while Nick called, and she listened to him outline the case to Grissom as she charted her house out in the middle of the darkness.  She had to weave a complex route through the sea of cars - - all the parents had gravitated towards the area where the cops were checking the bags of candy, and they all seem to have gravitated in their SUVs.

"Yeah, they've got him."  Slight pause.  "Pretty straightforward, but we'll do the follow-up tomorrow.  The guy will probably confess, though.  He'd be safer in a cell than back in his house - - you should see all the angry parents around here.  You'd have me and Cath covering a lynching next.  - - Right.  See you later, Grissom."  He clicked the phone shut in his hand.

"You're right," she said.

"About what?"

"Him being safer in a cell.  I feel up to some lynching myself.'

"That's why you have me," Nick said.  "I'm supposed to restrain you from joining any lynch mobs.  I only work holidays, though.  If you want to hang someone on Arbor Day, I'll stop you - - you're just going to have to wait until there's nothing going on."

He was trying to perk her up, and she was grateful for it, but she wasn't really in the mood.  She slid the car into the drive and parked.

Nick looked up at the house as they headed for the porch.  "I've never been here before," he said, interested.  "It's pretty.  I like your flowers."

She pushed the key into the lock.  "Yeah, hanging plants are pretty easy to keep up with.  If I tried to grow tomatoes, I'd be screwed."  She gave the key a jerk, and then pulled at the handle until the door creaked open.  She apologized for the noise.  "Need some new hinges."

They ended up in the kitchen as she made the sandwiches, stacking deli meat and pulling apart lettuce over the draining board.  He poured glasses of milk for some reason, like they were both kids, and she had to smile as he set them down carefully on the checkered tablecloth.  It looked picture-perfect, like a magazine illustration.  All they needed was a vase of flowers.

She handed him his sandwich and sat down across from him, watching the circling lights from her window.  More parents were heading up to the checking center.

"Think we should have stayed?" she asked.

He licked mustard off his finger.  "No.  We're done there, Catherine.  You didn't need to stick around any longer than you had to."  He ran his finger over the milk-glass until it squeaked on the condensation.  "Not everything's a battle, just proving that you can do it, you know?"

She kind of hated how he understood her that well.

"Yeah, I know," she said.  "It's just - - I hate it.  I hate that I have to worry about things like this happening to Lindsey.  I already worry about her going off with strangers, or getting separated from her group at field trips, and now I have to think about razor blades in her Halloween candy?  I worry about her so much I think I'm going crazy, and I still can't protect her from everything."

Nick finished his last bite and leaned forward.  "And you'll never be able to," he said.  "It's impossible."

"I know.  That's what's really bothering me, I guess."

"You finally figured out that you're not infallible?"  The teasing smile went a long way towards diffusing any anger she might have felt at that comment.  "You're human like the rest of us, Catherine.  You can't keep Lindsey from the world, and you can't keep the world from getting to you."

"I think about what it would have been like," she said finally.  "Picking up the apple, running it under your fingers, and biting into the superficial sweetness before you get to the sharp.  Before it cuts your mouth and blood drops against the peel."

Nick didn't say anything; just nodded.  His face seemed almost expressionless as she told him her thoughts as plainly as she could.

"I think about what it would have been like for me," Catherine continued, "to eat one of those, but mostly, I think about what it would have been like for Lindsey.  To hear her crying and maybe screaming.  And I thank God that she was at that party, and that my mother always taught me that you didn't take apples or cookies on Halloween.  I know she would've been safe.  But I can't get it out of my head.  The sweet, and then the sharp."  She brought her hand to her mouth and touched her lips, as if to make sure that they were still uncut, not bloodied.  "So unexpected."

Nick nodded.  Holding his sandwich plate, he walked to her fridge and pulled out an apple.  It was large, spotless, and red.  She hadn't wanted to touch it, but as he stood on the faded spot of linoleum, Nick cut it carefully with one of her paring knives, and offered her a slice.

"You don't have to guard against some things, though," he said.  "Some things are sweet all the way down."

They took a bite at the same time, and Catherine flinched as the juice hit her tongue, but nothing cut, nothing wounded.  Nick watched her carefully as he finished his own slice, and then held the plate out towards her.  She took another piece.

"Yeah," Catherine said.  "Some things are."

She put her hand on top of his, and he turned it so he could close his fingers over hers.  That time, he raised the slice of apple to _her _lips, and she hesitated.

He smiled.  "Don't worry, Cath.  This is just what it looks like."

She didn't know whether he was talking about the apple or his fingers against her mouth, and she didn't ask, because she didn't care.  She knew that both of them weren't dangerous, that they were both what they appeared to be, and that both of them would stay sweet all the way.


End file.
